BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Searching for a Life, He Found the Language

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Published: September 16, 1998

THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN

A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

By Simon Winchester

Illustrated. 242 pages. HarperCollins. $22.

The subtitle of Simon Winchester's new book, ''A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary,'' suggests one of the odder thematic combinations in recent publishing history. One might even suspect that no true story could bring these three elements together. But in fact ''The Professor and the Madman,'' the story of two oddly matched figures who were instrumental in creating the monumental O.E.D., entirely fulfills its subtitular promise.

The madman of Mr. Winchester's title (and the murderer of the subtitle) is William Chester Minor, an American doctor who served in the Civil War, then went to London in 1871 and, out of what we might now call a psychotic fantasy of persecution, killed a man he had never met. The professor is James Murray, the philologist and lexicographer who directed the enormous project to compile a complete record of the history and meanings of every word in English. Mr. Winchester, a British journalist who has written many books, has laid out a fascinating, spicy, learned tale in his account of the strange collaboration between the two men.

The book starts with an apocryphal story. Minor, living in a town called Crowthorne, about 50 miles from Oxford, was one of many volunteers who supplied information to the compilers of the dictionary. Murray, appreciative of Minor's contribution, traveled to Crowthorne in 1896 to meet him, and once there he discovered to his shock that his lexicographical helpmate was an inmate at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

But as Mr. Winchester's historical detective work reveals, the meeting of the two men did not happen exactly that way. Murray knew before he went to meet Minor that he was an inmate of the asylum. Two decades before this first meeting, which Mr. Winchester places in 1891, Minor was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the murder. Murray's appreciation of his unorthodox colleague was based on 10 years of Minor's prodigious volunteer work on the dictionary, work in which he established a unique role among the thousands of people who provided information for the great project. His role in the O.E.D. was a kind of penance, but the eerie paradox of these fateful crossings of paths is that had Minor never committed murder, he would never have been committed to Broadmoor, where he had endless time, and he would never have made his remarkable contribution.

Minor is the most interesting of the three main characters in Mr. Winchester's story, Murray and the O.E.D. itself being the other two. He was 37 when he went to London and murdered one George Merrett, a father of seven, in the early hours of a frigid morning in Lambeth, the dreary borough on the South Bank of the Thames famous for its bawdy music halls, its prostitutes and the 12th-century Lambeth Palace. Minor was born to missionary parents in Ceylon, went to Yale Medical School before serving in the Union Army, and developed a morbid fear of the Irish, a strange phenomenon but well explained by Mr. Winchester. His paranoia sent him to an asylum in Washington when the war was over, and it was on his release in 1871 that he went to London in search of a new life, a search that led him very quickly to Broadmoor.

Meanwhile, Murray, the son of a tailor and draper and a prodigious scholar, became the head of the ambitious project of the London Philological Society to compile what became, after 70 years of labor, the O.E.D. As he does with every one of the dramatis personae (including the man killed by Minor), Mr. Winchester artfully brushes in the necessary background, including a brief and fascinating history of British lexicography going back to before Samuel Johnson. When the new dictionary was conceived, he says of the O.E.D., ''it was a project of almost unimaginable boldness and foolhardiness, requiring great bravura, risking great hubris.'' It was, in short, a perfect emblem of British pride and power in the Victorian age.

To compile it, Murray enlisted the help of a large corps of volunteers who would pore through every book that had been published in English up to that time and cull quotations demonstrating each word's uses. This is where Minor came in. Most of the volunteers simply noted interesting quotations in the books assigned to them. Minor created what we might now call a data base, a vast collection of word lists and indexes, so that ''he stood ready now to help the dictionary project as it needed to be helped, by sending over quotations at the precise time the editors needed them.'' His first word was art. Whereas most volunteers came up with a couple of quotations, Minor delivered 27. He was ''able to tap deep into wells of knowledge and research.''

Mr. Winchester, who says that he had access to files closed for a century, follows Minor for his entire life, and uncovers some episodes that make for painful reading. ''The Madman and the Professor'' is a kind of case study of mental illness, the quietly mighty struggle of a man to create a world of significance even as his disease became more virulent and horrible as time went by. Mr. Winchester leads one to visualize the afflicted, guilt-ridden, demon-obsessed Minor alone in his cell patiently compiling his vast lists, corresponding with Murray and ardently seeking recognition. The vision is exceedingly poignant.

''Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful,'' Mr. Winchester writes. ''He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him.'' Minor also tried to make amends to the widow and children of the man he murdered, in particular by giving them money. But his enduring monument is the great dictionary that he worked on for 20 lonely years, striving to invest meaning into a ruined life.